96

Lamia wasn’t waiting for them at the lean-to.

Sabir grabbed his head in both his hands in an effort to ward off his migraine. ‘She’s lost. It’s still dark as hell out there. And everyone’s asleep. There’s nobody to ask for directions. She’ll not have wanted to disturb anybody.’

‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’

‘I don’t know it. What are you trying to tell me, Calque? What’s this great call you intend to make on our friendship? You’re not going to tell me that Lamia has somehow moved from being your blue-eyed girl to being one of the enemy again?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Where are your car keys?’

Sabir slapped his pockets. Then he looked blank. ‘They were in here.’

‘But she needed them for something, no?’

Sabir nodded slowly. ‘Yes. She wanted a change of clothing before the ceremony. Access to her toothbrush. That sort of thing. That still doesn’t put her back in the Corpus camp. Come on, man. What are you thinking? That after all they did to her she’s still loyal to them?’

‘But what did they do to her?’

‘You tell me. You’re the one that found her. You’re the one that brought her along on this trip. You’re the one that tipped me the wink that she was attracted to me. Christ, Calque. You’re the best friend she has in the world. You’re going to feel like a total asshole when she comes skipping back in from wherever she’s managed to lose herself. I’ll do you a real favour, though. Give you a real proof of our friendship. I won’t tell her what you suspected.’

Calque stared out at the gradually lightening sky. ‘They tied her up, put her on a table, and gave her a tranquillizer. That’s all they did to her.’

‘That would be enough for most people.’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Her name.’

‘Her name?’

‘She lied to us about her name.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’

‘She told us that Lamia was the daughter of Poseidon and the mistress of Zeus. That that was her only significance. That Zeus accorded Lamia the gift of prophecy as a down payment for her services to him in bed. That she was unimportant in the general scheme of things.’

‘So?’

‘So I thought about it. And then I thought about it some more. It niggled at me. All the other adoptive names – except for our old friend Achor Bale, aka Rocha de Bale, who was adopted at far too late an age for a name change – which in the case of a teenager like him would have had to have been referred to a juge des affaires familiales anyway …’

‘Calque, for crying out loud. You’re not on the police force any longer. You’re not making out a case for the prosecuting judge.’

‘The examining magistrate, please.’

Sabir slapped his forehead in frustration, and then instantly regretted it. ‘What about the names? Tell me.’

Calque sighed. ‘All the names of the Countess’s adoptive children are specific to some sort of demon or other. To one of the Devil’s henchmen, maybe, or to some other freak out of hell. Lamia explained all that to us. It’s categorical. Another of the Countess’s endearing little tics. So why should Lamia be any different?’

‘Why indeed?’ Sabir was beginning to look rather sick.

‘So when you were both up in your room doing whatever you were doing in that motel at Ticul, I phoned an old friend of mine in France. Got him to consult Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary. And one or two other books he happened to have to hand.’

‘Don’t tell me? Lamia was the Devil’s handmaiden, code name 666? Or maybe the Countess gave her the name of some famous female serial killer? The Countess Báthory, maybe?’

‘Nothing like that. The Countess Báthory’s given name was Erzsébet – Elizabeth to you.’

‘Come on, Calque. Don’t keep me in suspense. This is Lamia we’re talking about. The woman I happen to be in love with.’

‘That’s why I’m finding it so hard.’

‘Then make a superhuman effort and get over it.’ Sabir’s face looked livid and tormented in the fractional light of the early dawn. He looked as though he wanted to tear Calque apart with his bare hands.

Calque cleared his throat. ‘Lamia was indeed Zeus’s mistress. But she wasn’t unimportant. Far from it. In fact Zeus’s wife, Hera, became so jealous of Lamia’s sway over her husband that she killed all Lamia’s children and deformed her.’

‘Deformed her? How?’

‘She turned her into half woman, half serpent. She became a child-murdering demon. Her name means “gullet” in Ancient Greek. She’d kill other people’s children in revenge for her own, and then suck their blood and eat them. Zeus tried to placate her by offering her the gift of prophecy. He even gave her the ability to pluck out her own eyes, the better to see into the future – a little like your Vision Serpent, no? Horace writes about her in his Ars Poetica: “Neu pranse Lamiae vivum puerum extrabat alvo.”’

‘Go on. Translate it for me. You’re dying to. My everyday Latin’s a little rusty.’

‘“Shall Lamia in our sight her sons devour, and give them back alive the self-same hour?” Forgive my English accent. That’s Alexander Pope’s translation. The best, really.’

‘There’s more. I can smell it on you. Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying this?’

‘I’m not enjoying it, Sabir. It’s making me sick to my stomach.’

Sabir looked up quickly. The expression on his face underwent a brief transformation, as if a searchlight had shone across it. ‘I’m sorry, Calque. I must be feeling a little rattled. That was unfair. I know how fond you are of her. Go on. Tell me the rest. I promise not to murder the messenger.’

Calque shrugged, but he was clearly touched by Sabir’s change of heart. ‘Some authorities even link her with Lilith, the first wife of Adam, believing they were one and the same person. Jerome, in the fifth-century Vulgate – Isaiah 34:14 to be precise – even translates Lilith as Lamia. His version of Lamia conceived a brood of monsters with Adam, and then later transmogrified into the sort of fairy-tale nasty that nurses and nannies used to threaten their charges with.’

‘My name is also Adam, Calque. The same as Lilith’s husband. You may not have noticed that.’

‘I noticed it. As, I believe, did she. She seduced you on purpose, man. Because she’d been told to. In Apuleius’s time, they used Lamia as a name for seductresses and harlots. John Keats said “Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake/Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake …”’

‘All right. Enough now. I can see why that poor bastard Macron found you so intensely irritating.’ Sabir was hiding it well, but the nausea in his stomach was rapidly overtaking the pain in his head. ‘I think I’m about to be sick.’ He pushed Calque away, and then doubled up, retching.

When Sabir finally straightened up again, he realized that Calque had been joined by two new figures – one on either side of him. The first, an almost dwarf-like figure, was holding a very large pistol straight out ahead of her. Despite the fact that her hands could scarcely encompass the grip, the pistol was rock steady.

The second person, also a woman, but this time of normal height, had her head cocked to one side, as though she was secretly rather amused by Sabir’s temporary affliction. ‘Is this them?’

The smaller woman nodded. ‘It’s them.’

‘They don’t look like much. I say we kill them now and have done with it. We’ve got most of what we need already.’

‘Do you want to wake up the whole camp?’

‘I could slit their throats with my scalpel. No one would hear that. The foot drumming would be lost amidst all the snoring.’

Sabir was still dry-retching after his major evacuation of two minutes before. He pinched his nose between two of his fingers and snorted the final remnants of his stomach contents on to the ground. Then he looked up and shook his head fatalistically. ‘Are you two who I think you are? No. Don’t answer that.’ He reached inside his pocket. ‘How the heck did you find us again?’

‘Keep your hands out where we can see them.’

‘I only want my handkerchief.’

‘A bit of vomit never hurt anybody.’

Sabir took his handkerchief out anyway. ‘Then shoot, why don’t you?’ A part of him didn’t care any more whether they killed him or not. He walked over to the water bucket he and Lamia had shared and began to rinse his face. Aldinach accompanied him, her pistol held casually at hip level.

Sabir’s oddball mixture of acute oversensitivity and irrational bravado never ceased to amaze Calque. Sensing that the tall woman was getting ready to pistolwhip his friend, Calque raised his voice in an effort to deflect her attention. ‘They are who you think they are, Sabir. I’ve seen them before. At the Countess’s house. The smaller one is Athame. The taller one is …’ He hesitated, praying he’d got his timing right.

Aldinach stopped what she was about to do and turned towards Calque. ‘Aldinach. I am Aldinach. The hermaphrodite. You remember? Half man, half woman. But today I am only a woman.’ Aldinach did a sarcastic little pirouette to show off her figure.

‘Where is Lamia? Have you taken her?’

‘Ah. Our elusive elder sister. Do you know where she is, Athame?’

‘She bolted. I think at the end, that she suspected my presence in the touj. I had only a split second to decide on my priorities. So I chose these two.’

‘Good choice.’

‘You were inside the touj? That’s impossible.’ Sabir sank to his knees beside the bucket. He could still feel the cramping effects of the datura at work on his stomach. ‘We would have heard you.’

‘All of you were as high as kites in there. You were busy screaming that your eyes were being torn out, and the other idiots were chanting like a bunch of Hare Krishnas. None of you would have heard a siren in a snowstorm. Later on, after you all left, I even crept to the entrance and listened to your absurd post-mortem discussion.’

Sabir doubled up with another intestinal cramp.

‘Interesting about the identity of the Second Coming. I think a visit to Samois – for that’s where my brother Rocha told us your Yola Samana lives – will soon be in order. Shame you didn’t follow through with information about the Third Antichrist. It’ll make things harder for you. My brother Abi is still very unhappy about Rocha’s death. When he finds that you’ve been holding out on us …’ Athame stopped. ‘What do you think, Aldinach?’

‘I think both you boys will be gratified to know that we’ve reached a consensus. We’ve decided not to kill you for the time being.’ Aldinach waved her pistol at the two men. ‘Avanti. And don’t make a sound going through the camp. If you wake anybody up, we’ll kill them.’